The Wolf Gift (26 page)

“Truly,” he said. “I’m afraid for you; I’m afraid for you alone in this house.”

“I grew up in this house,” she said simply, without drama. “Nothing
has ever hurt me in this house.” She paused, then said: “You’ve come to me here in this house.”

He didn’t answer. He was stroking her hair.

“You’re the one I fear for,” she said. “I’ve been sick with fear for you since you left. Even now, I’m afraid that they’ve followed you here, or someone’s seen you.…”

“They haven’t followed me,” he said. “I would hear them if they were out there. I would pick up their scent.”

They were quiet for a while. He was watching the fire.

“I know who you are,” he said. “I read your story.”

She didn’t answer.

“Everyone today has a story; the world’s an archive. I read about the things that have happened to you.”

“Then you have the advantage, as they say,” she replied. “Because I do not have the slightest idea who you really are. Or why you came here.”

“I don’t know myself at the moment,” he said.

“Then you weren’t always what you are now?” she asked.

“No.” He laughed under his breath. “Most certainly not.” His tongue pressed against his fangs, ran against the silky black liplike tissue around his mouth. He shifted comfortably in the chair, and her weight was like nothing to him.

“You can’t stay here, I mean in the city, I mean here. They’ll find you. The world’s too small now, too controlled. If they catch the slightest hint that you’re in the forest, they’ll swarm over it. It only looks like a wilderness. It’s not.”

“I know that,” he said. “I know that very well.”

“But you take risks, terrible risks.”

“I hear voices,” he said. “I hear voices and I go to them. It’s as if I can’t help but go to them. Someone will suffer and die if I don’t.”

Slowly, he described it to her, pretty much the way he’d described it to Jim—the scents, the mystery of the scents. He talked about the various attacks, how the victims had been crying out in the darkness, how it had been so clear to him who was evil and who was good. He told her about the man who shot his wife.

“Yes, he would have killed the children,” she said. “I heard the story on the way home tonight in the car.”

“I didn’t get there in time to save the woman,” he said. “I am not infallible. I am something that can make terrible mistakes.”

“But you’re careful, so very careful,” she insisted. “You were careful with that boy up north.”

“The boy up north?”

“The reporter,” she said, “the handsome one, in the house in Mendocino—up north.”

He hesitated. Current of pain. Pain in the heart.

He didn’t answer.

“They surprised that woman, didn’t they?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“If they hadn’t, you would have—.” She stopped.

“Yes,” he said. “They surprised her. And they surprised me.”

He went quiet.

After a long time, she asked softly, tentatively, “What brought you down this far?”

He didn’t understand.

“Was it the voices, that there are so many more here?”

He didn’t answer. But he thought he understood. She was thinking he’d come down from the forests to the cities of the Bay Area. It made a kind of sense.

He was burning to pour it all out for her, burning. But he couldn’t. Not yet. And he couldn’t forsake holding her like this, the power of it, the protective and loving power. He couldn’t tell her that he wasn’t always like this, that he was in fact “that boy up north.” If he confessed that to her and she turned from him in scorn or indifference it would cut him to his soul.

That boy up north
. He tried to picture himself as just Reuben, Celeste’s Sunshine Boy, Grace’s baby, Jim’s little brother, Phil’s son. Why would that vapid “boy” interest her? It seemed absurd to think that he would. After all, Marchent Nideck hadn’t really been interested in him. She’d thought him sweet and gentle and a poet, and a rich boy with the means to take Nideck Point off her hands. But that was not interest, really; and that was hardly love.

What he felt for Laura was love.

His closed his eyes and listened to the slow rhythm of her breathing. She’d fallen asleep.

The forest whispered beyond the windows. Scent of bobcat. It maddened him. He wanted to stalk it, kill it, feast on it. He could taste it. His
mouth was watering. Sound of the creeks running deep in the redwoods; sound of the owls in the high branches, of things unnamable slithering in the brush.

He wondered what Laura would think if she saw him as he was in the forest, crushing that thrashing hissing bobcat and gorging on his hot flesh. That was the thing about these feasts: the flesh was so fresh. The blood was still pumping in it, the heart still quivering. What would she think if she really saw what it was like?

She had no idea, really, what it meant to see a man’s arm ripped out by the root, to see a head torn off a neck. She had no idea. We human beings live perpetually insulated from the horrors that happen all around us. No matter what she’d suffered, she had not witnessed the viscous ugliness of that kind of death. No, it had to be unreal to her, even Laura who had endured so much.

Only those who work day in and day out with the killers of the world know what they really are. It hadn’t taken him long as a reporter to realize that—why the cops he’d interviewed were so very different from other people, why Celeste was becoming so different as she worked on more and more cases for the district attorney, or why Grace was different because she saw the bodies rolled into the emergency room with the knives in their bellies and the bullet wounds in their heads.

But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren’t there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn’t smell the scent of evil; they didn’t hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.

A frightening sadness had come over him. He wanted her so much. But what right did he have to tell her these things? What right had he to seduce her with “stories” that made it all sound so meaningful when it was perhaps not meaningful—when it was violent and primitive and dark?

Just let me have these moments with her, he mused. Let me just hold her here by this fire, in this small house of simple things, and let this be all right for now.

He drifted off, feeling her heart next to his heart.

An hour must have passed, perhaps more time than that.

He opened his eyes. The forest was at peace, from one border to another.

But something was wrong out there. Something was very wrong. A voice pushed at the layers and layers of muffled sound that surrounded him. A voice rose thin and reedy and desperate.

It was a man screaming for help. Far beyond the forest. He knew the direction. He knew the scent would come.

He carried her to the back of the house and laid her gently in the bed. She woke with a start, rising up on her elbows.

“You’re going.”

“I have to go, it’s calling me,” he said.

“They’ll catch you. They’re everywhere!” she pleaded. She started to cry. “Listen to me!” she pleaded. “You’ve got to go back up north, to the forests, away from here.”

He bent quickly to kiss her.

“You’ll see me again very soon.”

She rushed after him but he was halfway across the clearing in a second and he leapt high up into the redwoods and began his swift journey towards the coast road.

Hours later, he stood in a small grove of trees looking out at the great cold Pacific under a lowering silver sky. The moon hung behind those rain clouds. The moon shone through to the tilting, shifting surface of the sea. Oh, if the moon only had a secret, if the moon only held a truth. But the moon was just the moon.

He’d tracked the car in which the man had been imprisoned, descended from the trees onto the roof of it, and when it slowed for a dangerous curve on Highway 1, he had torn the doors open, and dragged the ugly, hardened thieves out into the dark. They’d shot the man’s companion—but kept him alive, bound, gagged, suffocating in the trunk of the car. They’d meant to force him to an automatic teller window, for the few hundred dollars they could get from him, then kill him as they had the other man.

He’d feasted on both of the thieves before he freed the prisoner and left him on the cliff above the sea with the promise that help would soon come. After that, he had roamed the cliffs in the salt wind, letting the gusting rain wash away the blood from his paws, from his mouth, from his chest.

Now it was approaching dawn and he was exhausted and lonely as if he’d never held Laura in his arms.

We all need love, don’t we, even the worst killers, the worst animals! We all need love
.

He traveled back fast to where he’d left his Porsche off the Panoramic Highway, and waited there in the glade until the change came on. Again, it surprised him, seemed more amenable to his will. He flexed and forced it to greater and greater speed.

He drove the car into Mill Valley and put up at the charming and beautiful little hotel called the Mill Valley Inn. Best place to hide right on Throckmorton Street in the very center of town. Because now they really would be looking for the Man Wolf in Marin County and he had to see Laura before he went north, perhaps for a long time.

A
ROUND NOON
, he had just parked downhill from Laura’s house when she suddenly came out, got into an olive-green four-door Jeep, and drove down into the center of town, from which he’d only just come.

She went into a cheerful little café, and he saw her take her place at a table inside the front window alone.

He parked, and went inside.

She appeared wrapped in solitude as she sat there, snug in her corduroy coat, her face fresh and lovely as it had been last night. Her hair was tied back again with a black ribbon, and the symmetry of her face was flawless. It was the first time he’d seen her in the light of day.

He sat down opposite her without a word. He was dressed now more like his old self in a halfway-decent khaki jacket and a clean shirt and a tie—clothes he’d bought yesterday—and he’d scrubbed himself in the shower for an hour before checking out of the hotel. His hair was too thick and too long, but it was thoroughly combed.

“Who are you!” she demanded. She set the menu down and glanced angrily towards the back of the restaurant for the waiter.

Reuben didn’t answer. There was no waiter visible in the back of the restaurant just now. Only a couple of other tables were occupied.

“Look, I’m dining here alone,” she said politely but firmly. “Now, please go.”

Then her face changed. It went from anger and annoyance to thinly concealed alarm. At once her eyes hardened and so did her voice:

“You’re the reporter,” she said accusingly. “The one from the
Observer
.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?” She had become furious. “What do you want with me?” Her features were transformed into an obdurate mask. Inside, she was roiling with panic.

He leaned forward and he spoke in a warm intimate voice.

“I’m that boy from up north,” he said.

“Yes, I know that,” she said, not getting the connection. “I know just who you are. Now kindly explain: what do you want with me?”

He reflected for a moment. And again, she looked desperately for a waiter but none was in the main room. She started to get up. “Very well, I’ll have my lunch someplace else,” she said. She was trembling.

“Laura, wait.”

He reached out for her left hand.

Reluctantly, suspiciously, she sank back down in the chair.

“How do you know my name?”

“I was with you last night,” he said softly, “most of the night. I was with you until early morning when I had to go.”

He’d never in his life seen anyone so perfectly astonished. She was frozen, staring at him across the table. He could see the blood pounding in her pale cheeks. Her lower lip quivered but she didn’t speak a word.

“Reuben Golding is my name,” he went on in a low trusting voice. “It started up there for me, in that house, up north. That’s how it began.”

She took a deep ragged breath. The sweat broke out on her forehead and on her upper lip. He could hear her heart pounding. Her face softened and her lips were trembling. The tears rose in her eyes.

“Good heavens,” she whispered. She looked at the hand with which he was clasping hers. She looked at his face. She was taking his full measure and he felt it keenly, and the tears almost sprang to his eyes, too. “But who—? How—?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I do know that I have to leave here now. I’m going back up there. The place is mine—the house in Mendocino where it happened. It belongs to me. And I want to go there. I can’t stay here any longer, not after last night. Will you come with me?”

There it was, and he fully expected her to shrink from him, to pull her hand out of his and draw it down away from his reach. Her Man of the Wild was not a Man of the Wild after all.

“Look, I know you have your work, your tours, your customers.…”

“It’s the rainy season,” she said in a weak small voice. “There are no tours right now. I don’t have any work.” Her eyes were glassy, huge. She took another heaving breath. Her fingers wrapped around his.

“Oh …,” he said stupidly. He didn’t know what else to say. Then, “Will you come?”

It was unbearable to sit there quietly under her scrutiny, to wait until she spoke again.

“Yes,” she said suddenly. She nodded. “I’ll come with you.” She looked certain but dazed.

“You realize what you’re doing if you come with me.”

“I’m coming,” she said.

Now he really did have to fight the tears, and it took him a moment. He held tight to her hand but looked out the window, at rainy Throckmorton Street and the crowds hurrying to and fro under their umbrellas, in front of the many little shops.

“Reuben,” she said. She pressed his hand now tightly. She’d recovered herself and she was very serious. “We should leave now.”

As he steered the Porsche towards the Panoramic Highway, she began to laugh.